How to improve your SEO Rank for Christmas

Through the years an increasing amount of people are doing their shopping for Christmas online. A large proportion of these people are using Google to find what they are looking for. Therefore the big question for you is:

Can your customers find your online business and the products you sell on Google?

Why you should improve your search engine ranking for Christmas now?

It takes time to build your page rankings in Google. Therefore you should get started on preparing the Christmas sales for your online business now. This is also the case if your website is well optimized at the moment, as you then want to keep this rankings all the way up to Christmas. So, regardless if your website is optimized to day or not, it will be a good idea to evaluate it, make a plan for your Christmas SEO, and execute the plan.

Online businesses that do have a good SEO rank.

If you make a Google search and find that you rank well on the keywords that you want to, you need to evaluate if the SEO strategy that you have used already will also keep you up in the search engines in the future.

Google have made two major updates recently called Panda and Penguin. Panda focuses on the content and quality of your website and Penguin on the links that you get to your website. Both of these updates are adjusted regularly so we have not seen the full effect of them just yet.

Panda’s effect on your SEO ranking.

Panda aims to ensure that your web pages are downloading quickly and that the user experience is generally good. One way Google tries to guard the user experience, is by ensuring that the pages you have indexed for your online business are of a good quality. For you, this means that if you are unsure about the quality of a page, then you should tell Google not to index it.
Apart from this the quality of a page, Google also looks at how long you customers stay on your site, how many pages they view, how many links they click on etc. You should therefore do everything you can to optimize this.

Penguin’s effect on your SEO ranking.

With the introduction of Penguin a lot of links, which previously gave a good value, did suddenly loose their worth. In some cases Penguin indicates that links can be harmful for your page rank. This is the case if they are mostly of a poor quality. It is therefore important that you take a good look at your current link profile and evaluate the weaknesses it may have.

Online businesses that do not have a good SEO rank.

If you make a Google search and can’t find some of the products, product types or brands sold in your web shop, it’s time to get started with some basic SEO. Apart from this, it would properly also bee a good idea to do some advertising on Google Adwords (you can read how to set up your Google Adwords campaign here).

Step 1: Keywords and competition.

First of all you need to figure out how your potential customers are searching for the products that you are selling and what amount of competition exists on these searches. The aim here is to identify the searches that you think will generate sales and that have a reasonably amount of competition. Remember the aim is to rank well on these searches before Christmas so the competition can’t be too tough.

Step 2: Analyze your website.

It is very important that you have a good structure on your website, so that the search engines will not be confused when indexing it. Take a good look at your website structure and see if it seems logical. This will have a positive effect on both the search engines and your customers. You also need to make sure that the load time for you site is good. To have a sense of what Google think of your website load time and more, you can use Google’s own Webmaster tool.

Step 3: Implementation of keywords.

You also need to have a look at the content of your site. You have to make sure that the description of your product categories as well as your products are unique and well optimized for the search engines. That is, the keywords in step one needs to be implemented. An important thing to bear in mind is not to loose focus of the customer. The texts you write needs to sell the products to the customer and not read as if they are optimized for the search engines. Furthermore you also need to optimize all of your page titles and META descriptions.

Step 4: Get links to your site.

Lastly you need to find backlinks to your website. These links need to be both to the front page of your site and to the specific product pages. To get more links you should think about some activities that you could, do to make more people link to you. Here are some examples of activities:
• Competitions.
• Cool content.
• Videos.
• Games.

Where should you go from here?

All of this may sound like a lot to get started on, but it will be well worth you effort, if you can get a part of the increasing online Christmas sales. So despite of the workload optimizing your site for better SEO ranking is, it may very well be worth it. A good way not to get overwhelmed by the workload is to break it down into small pieces.

Maybe you can do some of the Christmas SEO yourself or maybe you need to hire somebody to do it for you. Regardless of how you want to do it, it is important that you get started, so that you can see the effect when your customers start searching for their Christmas shopping.

Rugholm

My name is Kasper.
I have a master degree in Business management and economics. I have worked several years as a business controller and the past 5 years as an IT consultant. In my spare time I have started up and driven several e-commerce’s sites. I often hear people talking about how they want to start up their own online business but don’t know where to begin. This is why I started up “Start It Up Now” to help people realize their dream of beginning their own online business.

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